Angel on the Inside

by Mike Ripley

  ‘You’re not going after this Len Turner, are you?’ she asked, and I assured her I had no intention of doing so.

  It was the last thing on my mind. I was more interested in avoiding the Turner clan than having them welcome me to Wales.

  As soon as Steffi had left, and I had followed and watched until the black TX1 had moved off, I asked the concierge for directions to Tyndall Street.

  Did I know Roath or Adamsdown?, he asked me, and I said not really.

  How about the prison at Newtown? It was near there.

  I could find that. I was good at prisons.

  I slipped him a tenner and pocketed his A-Z, then asked for my bill, paid it and checked out.

  Malcolm ‘Creosote’ Fisher had given me a name – Ion Jones – and the address of a light engineering works called Pengam Moor Tooling on a small industrial estate off Tyndall Street, only a grappling hook’s throw from Cardiff prison. That was my mission in Cardiff.

  And from the start, it was Mission Incredible.

  It was the sort of place where you didn’t want to leave the car unattended. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure about even slowing down, but I had to. The sign saying Pengam Moor Tooling swung from the one corner still attached by blue baling twine to a bent panel of Heras fencing. Underneath it was a hand printed sign saying ‘These Premissess Are Garded By Pit Bulls’, but there was no sign of a dog anywhere. Maybe they’d been stolen. Or perhaps they meant a real bull that had worked down the mines and had become a guard bull only since the pits closed.

  There were two vehicles in the yard – a dark blue Ford Escort that had seen better days and a dirty white Transit van that had probably never seen a good one. They were parked in front of an oblong brick shed with a flat roof and a shuttered door opened to head height to let fresh air in and the smell of hot oil and grease out. It also let out Radio 2 playing at full blast, which just about covered the whine of machinery.

  I reversed the Freelander, so that I was facing the way out of the yard, parked and locked it. Then checked I’d locked it. Then I turned my jacket collar up against the light drizzle and went and peered into the gloom of the shed and rapped on the shutters with my knuckles.

  ‘Helloooo? Shop?’

  A tall, gangling youth wearing dark blue overalls and a pair of plastic protective goggles appeared out of the shadows.

  ‘You’ll be wanting the boss, then, is it?’ he shouted over the background radio noise.

  ‘I’m looking for Ion Jones, is what I am,’ I said, realising immediately that I was doing a bad imitation of his sing-song Welsh accent and hoping he wouldn’t think I was taking the piss.

  ‘Mr Jones!’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘Visitor!’

  A small, no more than five feet tall, middle-aged man with a goatee beard appeared from behind a work bench where he had been completely obscured by a new Super 7 lathe and a couple of cheap Taiwanese bench drills. My first thought was that he must have to stand on a box to use them. My second thought was: why is he advancing on me carrying a still glowing red hot soldering iron in one hand?

  ‘Can I help you, young sir?’ he said, giving me a big grin that flexed his goatee to make him look positively Satanic. That and the red hot stick he was holding towards me.

  ‘I was looking for Ion Jones,’ I said nervously, ready to jump backwards out of the shed if he came much closer.

  ‘Oh, it’s Ion you want, is it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking I seemed to be doing all the answering, or maybe the Welsh just naturally spoke in questions.

  ‘Not Gareth Jones, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because that’s me, you see.’

  I couldn’t tell if that was a question or note, so I didn’t take my eyes off the soldering iron until he casually plucked a cigarette from behind his ear, stuck it in his mouth and applied the soldering iron to it. When it was lit, he put the iron down on the concrete floor and stepped over it, to exhale smoke in my general direction.

  I just breathed out.

  The bearded dwarf stepped by me and out into the yard, seemingly impervious to the drizzle.

  ‘Ion’s not with us any more. Was there anything we could do for you?’

  He held his cigarette between forefinger and thumb and flicked ash off the end with his middle finger.

  ‘I was told he worked here,’ I said.

  ‘So he did, didn’t he? Up until about a month ago. Is there a problem with Ion?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘I was told he’d be here, but ... I know this might sound crazy, but you’re not related to him are you?’

  ‘What, Ion?’ he roared, still determined to answer a question with a question. ‘No more than I am to Tom – or Catherine Zeta, more’s the pity.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, blushing. ‘Jones is quite a … er … popular name here, isn’t it?’

  Now I was doing it.

  ‘Popular? Dead common, I’d call it.’

  ‘So would I, actually,’ I said with a tentative grin, ‘but I’m not from around these parts.’

  ‘You’re not?’ he said, deadpan. ‘Get away with you. Thought you were a native.’

  ‘I guess I deserved that. Can you tell me what happened to Ion?’

  ‘You know Ion, then?’

  Damn him.

  ‘Nope, never met him in my life, but I have to follow up a bit of business he was involved in.’

  ‘Would this be the model business, then?’

  ‘Yes, it would.’

  A straight answer seemed to stump him, but only for as long as it took him to draw on his cigarette.

  ‘Great one for the model engineering was Ion. Caught him working late on one of the machines once. Said he was making a gas-turbine model locomotive, would you credit it? Him who needed help tying his bootlaces, he’s there building a jet engine the size of a can of Coca-Cola, which could do 160,000 revs per minute. What rpm does that fine beast of a car of yours there do?’

  ‘About 6,500 rpm flat out,’ I said, wondering if this was going anywhere.

  ‘So was that what he was working on for you?’

  I decided to play along.

  ‘No, nothing so elaborate. I was looking for a model ...’ I thought quickly. ‘… a model traction engine, and I was told Ion was the man to build one.’

  ‘One than ran on Welsh coal, was it?’

  ‘Naturally,’ I said, as if I knew what he was talking about.

  ‘You didn’t give him any money up front, did you?’ the other Jones asked, and for the first time he avoided my eyes, making a big play of dropping his cigarette and crushing it out with semi-circular turns of his boot.

  ‘Yes, I did, as a matter of fact,’ I said, taking a chance. ‘Was that a bad idea, you think?’

  ‘It might have been. Ion’s not a bad lad, but then again, he’s not the firmest slate in the chapel roof.’

  It took me a second or two to realise he hadn’t asked me a question and that I had cracked it. There was no point in trying to engage in conversation with the Welsh; what they wanted was gossip.

  ‘You didn’t have to let Ion go, like they say these days, did you?’ I went on the question offensive.

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that. He was a good worker ...’

  ‘Well, I’d heard that,’ I chipped in.

  ‘But a bit of a dreamer, and one day he said he wanted to branch out on his own, set up his own business.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been fair to try and stop him, would it?’

  I was getting good at this and quite prepared to throw in a few rhetorical ones just for effect.

  ‘No, you can’t take dreams away from a lad like Ion. And anyway, he had the money.’

  ‘You saw it?’ I said, lowering my voice and hoping I wasn’t overdoing the awe.


  Mr Jones leaned into me conspiratorially, which meant I had to bend at the neck.

  ‘Seven thousand of your English pounds,’ he whispered. ‘Saw it myself, I did. I hope it wasn’t yours.’

  I pushed my hands into my pockets and shuffled my feet.

  ‘Not all of it ...’

  Gareth Jones looked triumphant. It was just as he’d thought. A daft Englishman with his fancy big car had been taken in by local boy Ion. But Gareth Jones wasn’t one to gloat.

  ‘Well, I’ll say this, I never had cause to question Ion’s honesty, and if he said he’ll make you one of his models, then I’m sure he will. He seemed to be serious when he gave his notice in. I mean, after all, he bought one of my old machines off me – though he got a fair price, mind you.’

  ‘He bought a machine?’

  ‘Oh yes, one of my Boxford lathes. It has a few miles on the clock, I don’t deny, but he wouldn’t have got one cheaper anywhere else.’

  ‘So he bought a lathe to set himself up in his own business?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Said he’d got some premises dirt cheap and might even get a grant from Europe if he employed anybody. And he certainly had a bit of start-up capital, like I told you.’

  ‘And this was about a month ago?’

  ‘That’d be right. It was what he’d always wanted to do. He was model mad, that boy.’

  I put on what I thought was a suitably anxious face.

  ‘Look, Mr Jones, this model I was after ...’

  ‘The traction engine, was it?’

  Was it?

  ‘Yes, that one. It’s not the money, it’s just that this was going to be a present for someone and ...’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. I’ve got children of my own, and in this day and age any son of mine who wanted a finely-tooled model traction engine instead of a Game Box or whatever they call them, well, that’s to be admired, isn’t it?’

  I was so glad he’d swallowed that. I was still stuck with the image of explaining away a model traction engine as Amy’s Christmas present.

  ‘So would you know how I can get hold of Ion, then?’ I asked, throwing myself on his mercy.

  ‘Derek in there can tell you exactly. He delivered the Boxford to Ion’s premises in the van, didn’t he?’

  Mr Jones stepped back into the gloom of the workshop and shouted to make himself heard above the radio and the machinery.

  ‘Derek! Where was that place in Tregaron you took the Boxford

  to?’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gareth Jones (no relation) and the boy Derek (still wearing plastic goggles) described the route to Tregaron, which they said was about 90 miles away and would take me two hours at least, but I couldn’t go wrong. It was between Lampeter and Aberystwyth, as if that meant anything to me.

  At the first garage outside Cardiff, I bought an Ordnance Survey Landranger map (Number 146) and wasn’t much wiser. It was indeed between Lampeter – which I had heard of because it had a university that specialised in theoretical archaeology – and Aberystwyth – which I’d heard of because it had a university that specialised in Welsh.

  Tregaron on the map seemed surrounded by green patches with conifer tree icons, which I took to be forests, and close circular brown curves, which I knew were contour lines and indicated hills. To the north of the town was marked a wide blue marsh area astride the River Teifi, which was labelled Cors Caron Nature Reserve and seemed to be some sort of swamp. To the south west was the site of a Roman fort and bath house, though no indication at all as to how you actually got near enough to see it. I might as well have being looking at one of the maps of Middle Earth in the back of The Lord of the Rings, for which anyone over the age of about ten needs a magnifying glass.

  Fortunately, the first tranche of the journey was M4 motorway all the way; to the end, in fact, bypassing Port Talbot and Swansea on the one side and ignoring the signs to the other that said things like Tonypandy, Treorchy, Pontypridd and Merthyr Tydfil, which brought back faint classroom memories of rugby, trades unionism, coal mining and male voice choirs, but could just as well have actually come from The Lord of the Rings.

  From then on, I was following the map and driving with one hand, which became slightly hazardous, not just because of the rain, which seemed to have set in, but because the road started to rise then fall then twist as I followed signs for Llandeilo and then Llandovery and other places that started with a double ‘L’. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I then worked out that Llandovery was actually the same place as Llanymddyfri, and by that time I was quite willing to stop and ask a passing hobbit for directions. Trouble was, they were all sensibly indoors keeping out of the rain and stoking up their coal fires, the smoke from the chimneys of the squat stone houses the only sign of life, and one that anyone from smoke-free London would notice straight away.

  To be fair, as I crossed over the arse end of the Cambrian Mountains, I suspected the scenery would have been stunning on a day when it wasn’t raining. The average tourist takes a gamble on finding that day, and I hear that the National Lottery offers you better odds at 14,000,000 to one.

  I saw a sign saying Lampeter and followed it, heading north-west as the main road branched north-east. I had the windscreen wipers on slow so I could pick out the quaint stone village houses of Pumsaint, which I knew meant ‘Five Saints’, and the signs leading off the road to Dolauchti and to the gold mines – yes, gold mines – that had been there before the Romans arrived. In fact, they were one of the reasons the Romans had come in the first place, and they had literally moved mountains (using water sluices) to get at what little Welsh gold there ever was, in one of the first acts of environmental vandalism ever recorded.

  And then I was in Lampeter, or Llanbedr Pont Steffan as I was told to call it. The only university town in the United Kingdom without a McDonalds. But it did have a police car, the first one I’d seen in Wales, with ‘Heddlu’ painted on the doors and, backwards, on the bonnet. The biggest bonus though was it also had a signpost saying Tregaron.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but then I didn’t really know where I was going. I was just dropping down from a country road into a small town nestling at the bottom of the River Teifi valley. Suddenly there were slate-roofed houses and a school and a library and then a narrow street with cars – lots of cars – parked down both sides, and then there was a bridge, and over that seemed to be the town centre: a bank, a post office, a garage, a butcher’s shop, a Co-Op store (‘Open til 10 every night’), a sign pointing to something called the Red Kite Centre and then a town square of sorts, with a statue of some politician or other (you could just tell), which doubled as a municipal car park. Or so I thought as I slowed down.

  There seemed to be no other reason for all those cars to be parked there in such a haphazard way. It must be a car park, I thought, though in truth it seemed to be a road junction; a crossroads, in fact.

  Then I realised that I had automatically come to a stop – as had so many others – outside The Talbot Hotel, where all the lights were on, even though it wasn’t dark. In fact, it wasn’t yet three o’clock in the afternoon, yet some cars – and not all of them Volvos – were driving on side lights.

  A good time seemed to be being had by all, judging from the music coming from within. It seemed as good a place to start as any.

  I followed the local custom and didn’t so much as park the Freelander as simply abandon it on the crossroads. In London, I wouldn’t have lasted 20 seconds without a ticket.

  I pulled up the collar of my jacket against the rain, although doing so only made me wish I’d brought an umbrella, and ran for the front door of the Talbot. As I got nearer, the music seemed to get more familiar, but it came with singing, which didn’t immediately register as quite right.

  The music was easy, that was ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’, but the words weren’t in English and
the music wasn’t … well, wasn’t the brass ensemble syncopated treatment you would expect. I could hear bagpipes, for Christ’s sake!

  I stopped a yard short of the door and listened carefully, trying to work it out, get the sounds clear in my head.

  Yes, there were bagpipes, and yes, there was singing in two languages, English and – not Welsh, but Breton, as in Brittany in France.

  Here I was in the middle of Wales, miles from the nearest anything, and here was a pub with a live bagpipe band playing traditional jazz.

  Things were looking up.

  The bar was heaving and there was only one large, solid-looking barman on duty, but he seemed perfectly able to deal with the crowd, serving drinks with a mechanical fluency without moving his feet and managing to speak three languages – Welsh, Breton and English, in that order – without pausing for breath.

  In a timbered alcove, three pipers – playing authentic binou pipes – and a guitarist were segueing into ‘St James Infirmary’, and from the audience came the hum of signing, but whether they were singing the proper words or not – or in which language – I couldn’t tell.

  The barman told me the kitchen had closed, though it would reopen at six, and served me a pint of lager and a packet of roasted peanuts whilst pulling drinks for at least two other customers, and he still had time to chat.

  ‘This lot are a bit off the beaten track, aren’t they?’ I jerked my head towards the band and the singing, which was definitely in Breton. Or maybe Welsh.

  ‘Come here every year for the arts festival, don’t they?’ he said.

  ‘Arts festival, is it?’

  He gave me a quizzical look. I had to stop doing the phoney Welsh inflections.

  ‘Oh yes, very popular. You’ve just missed it, really. Finished on Sunday night officially. This lot are going home to France tomorrow morning.’

  ‘So there’ll be a bit of a party tonight, will there?’

  ‘It’s party night every night this lot are here, but if it’s a party you want, you should be here tomorrow night. That’s when the Irish turn up.’